Technology
Services
Resources
When it comes to running an eCommerce business, there is a veritable wealth of relevant data you can use to improve performance and drive increased sales. Across the plethora of marketing and advertising channels, there are myriad metrics you can follow that expose which campaigns and initiatives are creating value and which are falling short.
If you want to ensure you’re getting all the most relevant insights to optimize your eCommerce marketing initiatives, here are 13 components you need as part of your marketing dashboard:
An eCommerce dashboard is a summary of all the marketing and business data that is most important to you. Instead of making you dig into pages and pages of reports, a dashboard allows you to get a snapshot overview of performance and track weekly, monthly, or quarterly trends.
When you use a Marketing Intelligence Platform (MIP) to centralize and analyze all your business data, it can help you build a dashboard of key performance reports that you can use to make optimization decisions. A dashboard can help you understand how your sales and marketing initiatives are performing overall.
The best thing about dashboards is that they’re customizable. Using widgets, you can add in all your own reports and track the metrics that are most important to your business. You can start with a template then add and remove widgets as needed. If you’re just getting started, here are some important dashboard components to include to make eCommerce management easy:
Every eCommerce dashboard needs an overview of key sales metrics that marketers can see at a glance, such as:
As an informed eCommerce marketer using dashboard analytics, you’ll have a good idea of what your AOV is any day of the week. So when you notice any major changes in performance, you know there’s an issue that needs to be addressed. Having these key sales metrics at your fingertips can help you always ensure your marketing and sales initiatives are on track for success.
Cart abandonment rates average around 76% for eCommerce sellers, leaving huge opportunities for improvement. You should always pay close attention to changes in your eCommerce store’s cart abandonment rate because they could be indicative of an underlying problem. There are a variety of potential factors that can cause people to leave without finishing their purchase, such as high shipping costs, slow shipping speed, long checkout process, and bad site user experience. Including your ongoing cart abandonment rate as a dashboard component can help you monitor and find ways to improve it.
Average Conversion Rate is an important metric to monitor as it can tell you a lot about how your overall marketing performance helps drive sales for your eCommerce business. With this dashboard component, you can compare your current conversion rate to the previous period or year. You can also break down your conversion rate across different traffic channels to compare and determine which are the most valuable for your business. If you find a particular channel has a much lower conversion rate than others, you could start initiatives to improve your marketing and user experience for this particular audience.
Key traffic metrics like total users and traffic sources should also be at the top of your eCommerce dashboard report. While total users won’t tell you much about the performance of your marketing campaigns, it does show you how many opportunities you have to drive a conversion. Traffic sources also give you a great overview of the potential value of different marketing channels, such as direct, organic search, referral, and paid ads.
As an eCommerce marketer, it’s important to know which products are your top sellers. Having an overview of your top 10 best-performing products as a dashboard component can help you monitor this at a glance. With this dashboard component, you can easily see how many sales you’ve made in the current period for particular products, how performance has changed over time, your total revenue from each product, and how it’s increased or decreased over time.
General demand changes, seasonality, and other factors can impact which products drive the most revenue over time. Paying attention to this report helps you discover changes you can make to your paid marketing initiatives to push products that will return the most profitable margin.
When you use an eCommerce dashboard that integrates with Google Analytics and Google Search Console, you can get reports of your top organic keywords and their performance right from your dashboard. At a glance, you’ll be able to see what your top keywords are and your average position, as well as clicks, impressions, and CTR for each.
This is a valuable overview of your organic SEO performance but also can show opportunities to broaden your reach with PPC ads. For example, if keywords related to your top-performing products aren’t ranking well in organic search, you can target them through PPC to get more visibility for your best products.
Cost per acquisition (CPA) is another important component to have on your eCommerce marketing dashboard, especially if you’re investing in paid traffic through Facebook Ads or Google Ads.
Here’s how CPA is calculated:
(Total cost of paid traffic) / (Total sales from paid traffic) = Cost Per Acquisition
This metric is of course readily available to you through Google Ads and Facebook Analytics. However using your dashboard, you can see a combined metric that reflects how your paid ads are performing overall across platforms. Having this metric available at a glance on your dashboard alongside other components can also help you identify and address potential factors that could impact your CPA.
Not all site visitors are going to convert into paying customers the first time they visit, which is why Cost Per Lead is an important metric to track. Cost Per Lead helps you understand how effective your marketing campaigns are at generating leads for your business, based on how much budget you spent on the campaign. This metric is particularly valuable for eCommerce businesses that sell more expensive items, where lead nurturing is a key aspect of driving conversions.
End Action Rate is a measure of the last thing your audience members do as part of a marketing campaign. This dashboard component can include a graph illustrating what percentage of audience members take different actions, such as leaving your site, bounce, social engagement, purchase, or contact requests.
End Action Rate helps you understand how effective your campaigns are at driving key goals like engagement, lead generation, or sales.
Return on Investment (ROI) is a key metric eCommerce marketers need to make better growth decisions. ROI lets you understand how your time and money invested in marketing campaigns contribute to driving revenue and business growth.
ROI refers to your financial investment in a particular marketing campaign and new revenue generated by that campaign to calculate the metric. Say you spent $10,000 on an advertising campaign in a month, and during that time your sales grew by $15,000. Here’s what you’d end up with:
ROI = [($10,000 - $5,000) / $5,000)] x 100 = 50% ROI
ROI can tell you if a campaign is worthwhile to continue investing in, and can help marketers discover if their optimization tactics improve their bottom line.
Sales by marketing channel is an important metric for understanding which platforms and strategies are most effective at generating sales. Including this as a component in your eCommerce dashboard helps you easily see how paid ads, organic traffic, email marketing, and other channels drive revenue.
This can reveal opportunities to better allocate your marketing investment and drive more eCommerce sales through digital marketing.
Most eCommerce marketers put too much focus on finding new customers and overlook nurturing existing ones. Customer lifetime value (CLV) is a measurement of how much revenue you can expect to earn from a single customer. Paying attention to CLV can help you focus on optimizing the entire customer journey, not just the path to first purchase. Monitoring changes to CLV can also inform you of how your retention efforts are performing so you can take steps to reduce churn.
New vs returning customers is another valuable metric that illustrates how your retention efforts are doing. Since it’s cheaper and easier to convert an existing customer than to complete a sale with a brand new customer, returning customers offer a huge opportunity to increase your ROI. Using your email campaigns, you can engage and upsell your existing customers, and monitor the effectiveness of these efforts with the new vs returning customers metric.
Even as a seasoned marketer, it’s easy to get overwhelmed with the amount of relevant performance data to work with. An eCommerce dashboard is the solution marketers need to summarize important reports and track performance at a glance. Dashboard component widgets allow you to customize your reports to focus on the metrics that matter most to your unique business. Start out with the components mentioned in this post to build your dashboard, then add in new variables over time to optimize it.